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GOD? VERY PROBABLY: FIVE RATIONAL WAYS TO THINK ABOUT THE QUESTION OF A GOD

Familiarity dulls our awareness but we daily surrounded by miracles. Human consciousness has no scientific explanation and no prospect of finding one. It is impossible in concept to explain something that exists as a mental construction outside time and space by applying the methods of physics that deal only with events in the natural world of time and space. The enormous successes of physics that depend on the use of mathematics are themselves another miracle. Like human consciousness, the world of mathematics, as discovered by mathematicians, exists outside time and space. A law of mathematics is an eternal concept with no natural origin or explanation. Yet, as Plato argued in ancient Greece, and was confirmed by the development of the scientific method in the seventeenth century, mathematics miraculously controls the workings of the natural world—as the Princeton Nobel physicist Eugene Wigner famously pointed out in the 1960s. God? Very Probably examines how the naturalistic understanding of the world as developed by atheists such as Richard Dawkins, and often unthinkingly accepted by far larger numbers of contemporary true believers in scientific materialism, is itself rationally untenable. Besides the existence of human consciousness and the scientifically inexplicable effectiveness of mathematics, the book examines three additional ways in which rational argument undermines scientific materialism and opens the way to the conclusion that we must turn to supernatural explanations—resulting from the actions of a god—in order to understand basic features of our ordinary human existence. Rational argument at its highest levels does not undermine religion; rather, it very probably requires it.

REACHING FOR HEAVEN ON EARTH

Many economists have argued that their professional field of study is based on the application of scientific methods to the world of human economic events in society. When the American economics profession was created in the progressive era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it thought of itself in these terms, and promised that the scientific discoveries of economics would lead to the scientific management of the economic system, thus leading to rapid economic progress and the eventual attainment of a new heaven on earth. Published in 1991, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics finds that modern economics has failed as a science; rather, it is best understood as the proselytizing of new secular “economic religions” disguised as science – a main source of their attraction. Moreover, the fundamental substance, as opposed to outward form, is less novel than economists have supposed. Indeed, the roots of modern economics can be traced to sources in Jewish and Christian religion and history, and before that to ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. These long historical lines of thought leading up to the modern economics of the twentieth century are revealed in Reaching for Heaven on Earth.

ECONOMICS AS RELIGION

When the first edition of Economics as Religion appeared in 2001 from Penn State Press, it was as a sequel to my 1991 book, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics. The first book was a broad survey of the philosophical and religious origins of economic thinking and events dating to ancient Greece. I saw a need for a sequel because my exploration there of the writings of important historic thinkers about economic matters had largely ended at World War II. It thus seemed desirable to write a new book that would focus on the economics profession during the second half of the twentieth century, showing that the underlying religious content of economics was still as powerfully present as ever, if now in a still more implicit and thus further disguised form. In Economics as Religion, I examine how professional economists are the priesthood of a modern secular religion of the salvation of the world by economic progress.​

THE NEW HOLY WARS

As compared with professional economics, the environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s has exhibited a much deeper skepticism concerning the ultimate redeeming benefits of economic progress. I have since explored the deep tensions between the economic and the environmental ways of thinking in my 2010 book The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, itself a sequel to my 2001 book Economics as Religion. This most recent book -- also from Penn State Press -- uses the juxtaposition of the economic and environmental belief systems – actual religions as I see them -- as a particularly effective way of clarifying the core faith commitments of each of these two leading secular faiths of our times. For those theologians and other people who accept that a secular religion can be a genuine form of religion – as many do today – the study of economic, environmental and other forms of secular religion of the twentieth century then becomes an essential part of any full contemporary inquiry into the major religious developments of our age. ​

ZONING AND PROPERTY RIGHTS

​PRIVATE NEIGHBORHOODS

PUBLIC LANDS AND PRIVATE RIGHTS

While earning my Ph.D. in economics at Princeton University in the late 1960s, I began my professional career as an economic student of the workings of American urban land use. American zoning dated to its introduction in New York City in 1916 as a progressive-era governing institution. There were high hopes that it would mean a new era of efficiency and aesthetic attraction in the creation of urban towns and cities. By the 1960s, however, as I examined in 1977 in Zoning and Property Rights, published by MIT Press, these progressive hopes had been dashed. Zoning and other local land use regulation was in reality a disguised privatization of local land use in the United States -- and as such it had profoundly regressive consequences for Americans of middle and lower incomes. Still then in my early 1930s, I brashly proposed in the book to abolish the American zoning system and substitute in its place what I described as “a new system of metropolitan land tenure.” Although these ideas were not adopted, this book is still being read among American students of the land use regulatory system.​

The most important development in local governance in the United States since the 1960s as been the rise of homeowners associations and condominiums -- the main forms of “community associations.” At present, starting from less than 1 percent in 1970, more than 20 percent of Americans now live in community associations, and the total continues to rise rapidly. A community association is in essence a new American form of private local governance, regulating land use, providing key local public services, and in general managing the local neighborhood environment through private legal instruments. My 2005 book Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, published by The Urban Institute Press in Washington, DC, provides an in-depth examination of the origins of this basic change in American land tenure, its current status, its future implications for local governance in the United States, and proposals for future reforms.

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As a top economic advisor working in the Office of the Secretary of the Interior from 1975 to 1993, I had the opportunity to observe first hand the workings of public land decision making in the United States. The public land system -- still covering about 30 percent of the nation -- has origins in the progressive era from 1890 to 1920 and its “gospel of efficiency” that sought to advance the scientific management of American society. Federal land management agencies such as the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management were expected to be leading models of the application of progressive scientific principles. In reality, as I examine in my 1995 book Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure of Scientific Management, rather than science, politics and political ideology (or implicit religion as it might better be described) dominated their land management decisions. The book examines the uncertain search in the later decades of the twentieth century for a replacement for the failed progressive paradigm for the conduct of public land management. As the role of the federal government in managing western lands is increasing debated today, this book remains an important reference.​